The University of Arizona, established in 1885, is Arizona’s land-grant university and a public research institution in Tucson. It reported 54,384 students in fall 2025.
Agriculture is taught and researched in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences (CALES), which works alongside Cooperative Extension and the Arizona Experiment Station. The college says its research runs from soil and plant science to natural resource and wildlife management, and it lists focus areas including animal systems; plant, insect and microbe systems; and environment, energy and natural resources. The Arizona Experiment Station, founded in 1890, operates nine locations, among them the Maricopa, Yuma and Safford agricultural centres and the Santa Rita Experimental Range, and says it supports more than 250 new projects each year. College centres include the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center, the Water Resources Research Center and the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture, which the college describes as a public-private partnership linking scientists with the desert agriculture industry.